An economy for the Earth

Humanist, May-June, 2002 by Lester R. Brown

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres," in which he challenged the view that the sun revolves around the Earth, arguing instead that the Earth revolves around the sun. With his new model of the solar system, he began a wide-ranging debate among scientists, theologians, and others. His alternative to the earlier Ptolemaic model, which had the Earth at the center of the universe, led to a revolution in thinking, to a new worldview.

Today we need a similar shift in our worldview in how we think about the relationship between the Earth and the economy. The issue now is not which celestial sphere revolves around the other but whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Economists see the environment as a subset of the economy. Ecologists, on the other hand, see the economy as a subset of the environment.

Like Ptolemy's view of the solar system, the economists' view is confusing efforts to understand our modern world. This has resulted in an economy that is out of sync with the ecosystem on which it depends.

Economic theory and economic indicators don't explain how the economy is disrupting and destroying the Earth's natural systems. Economic theory doesn't explain why Arctic Sea ice is melting, why grasslands are turning into desert in northwestern China, why coral reefs are dying in the South Pacific, or why the Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed. Nor does it explain why we are in the early stages of the greatest extinction of plants and animals since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Yet economics is essential to measuring the cost to society of these excesses.

Evidence that the economy is in conflict with the Earth's natural systems can be seen in the daily news reports of shrinking forests, eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, expanding deserts, rising carbon dioxide levels, falling water tables, rising temperatures, more destructive storms, melting glaciers, rising sea level, dying coral reefs, collapsing fisheries, and disappearing species. These trends, which mark an increasingly stressed relationship between the economy and the ecosystem, are taking a growing economic toll. At some point this could overwhelm the worldwide forces of progress, leading to economic decline. The challenge for our generation is to reverse these trends before environmental deterioration leads to long-term economic decline--as it did for so many earlier civilizations.

These increasingly visible trends indicate that, if the operation of the subsystem--the economy--is not compatible with the behavior of the larger system--the ecosystem--both will eventually suffer. The larger the economy becomes relative to the ecosystem, and the more it presses against the Earth's natural limits, the more destructive this incompatibility will be.

An environmentally sustainable economy--an eco-economy --requires that the principles of ecology establish the frame work for the formulation of economic policy and that economists and ecologists work together to fashion the new economy. Ecologists understand that all economic activity, indeed all life, depends on the Earth's ecosystem--the complex of individual species living together, interacting with each other and their physical habitat. These millions of species exist in an intricate balance, woven together by food chains, nutrient cycles, the hydrological cycle, and the climate system. Economists know how to translate goals into policy. Ecologists and economists working together can design and build an eco-economy that can sustain progress.

Just as recognition that the Earth is not the center of the solar system set the stage for advances in astronomy, physics, and related sciences, so will recognition that the economy isn't the center of our world create the conditions to sustain economic progress and improve the human condition.

Converting the world economy into an eco-economy, however, is a monumental undertaking, as the current gap between economists and ecologists in their perception of the world could not be wider. There is no precedent for transforming an economy shaped largely by market forces into one shaped by the principles of ecology.

The scale of projected economic growth outlines the dimensions of the challenge. The growth in world output of goods and services from $6 trillion in 1950 to $43 trillion in 2000 has caused environmental devastation on a scale that we could not easily have imagined a half-century ago. If the world economy continues to expand at 3 percent annually, the output of goods and services will increase fourfold over the next half-century, reaching $172 trillion.

Building an eco-economy in the time available requires rapid systemic change. We won't succeed with a project here and a project there. We are winning occasional battles, but we are losing the war because we don't have a strategy for the systemic economic change that will put the world on a development path that is environmentally sustainable.